Television

Overall, a fairly balanced piece. Paxman said there was a lot that the scientists don’t know, giving ammunition to those who say the whole thing has been overblown. Introduction from Susan Watts said what the report is going to say and mentioned the difficulty over the slowdown. In pre-recorded clips, Ed Hawkins insisted that warming had not stopped, using the excuses of volcanoes, the sun and the deep ocean heat, while Myles Allen played with little pieces of coal on a table. Live in the studio, Emily Shuckburgh was given a hard time by Paxman. Tsonis said the science isn’t settled and we need to understand natural variation better. There’s then an interview with Lord Stern, tedious except for the marvellous Paxman Sneer at 34:09.

This David Shukman item ran on the 6pm and 10pm BBC news. An oceanographer named Brian King claimed that ocean warming of 1/100th of a degree would have a significant effect on the atmosphere. Unusually for the BBC, a short (27 sec) excerpt with sceptical blogger Andrew Montford was shown.

Blogs

Steve McIntyre has come out of apparent semi-retirement to comment on how the IPCC addresses the disparity between models and observations.

Pointman: Armageddon report no 5. I sometimes find it hard to see exactly what Pointman is saying, but he does have a way with words: “You spin or ignore whatever the tedious coneheads have produced copious volumes of and the summary becomes your bitch.”

Spectator blog: Climatology’s great dilemma. How to talk about the slowdown in warming?

James Delingpole draws attention to the increasing confidence of the IPCC as warming has slowed down.